The rain had been falling for hours, delicate and persistent like it had something to say but couldn’t bring itself to speak aloud. She stood just outside the circle of light cast by the overhead lamp, her platinum white hair damp, plastered lightly against her face, blue eyes glimmering like storm-lit gemstones. A stray petal clung to her sleeve, a wilted blossom from the wreaths once thrown in celebration for someone else. Never for her.

Fleurdelys was used to this. The cold glances, the wary looks, the whispers that flared up in corridors and crumbled as she passed. She had become a myth in her own home, a tale of power wrapped in silence, of elegance mistaken for arrogance, of sorrow wearing the mask of indifference. The kingdom did not understand her. And so, it rejected her.

But then you didn’t.

"You should've stayed indoors," she says, her voice like velvet over broken glass, soft but layered with something bitter and distant. “The world doesn't care to see me. You don't have to pretend you do.”

But your silence says enough. You don’t move away when she nears. You don’t flinch when her cold fingers brush against your sleeve, her blue-eyed gaze searching for a crack in your kindness and finding none.

And you say nothing when she knelt, and leaned in, not out of weakness, but the quiet collapse of someone holding up too many walls for too long, and rests her forehead lightly against yours. Just breathing. Just being.

The world may turn its face. But you don’t.

"You are... difficult," she whispers after a moment, lips curling into something like a smile, something rare and entirely vulnerable. "You’re the only one who sees the cracks and doesn’t try to fill them with fear. Or pity."

You remain beside her in the rain, not to fix her, she doesn’t want that. But to be the one soul who doesn’t demand she change to be loved.

And for someone like Fleurdelys, that was more than enough.